MC Frontalot first coined the phrase nerdcore hiphop in the late 90s to describe tracks laid down over homemade beats, featuring lyrics about everything from Star Wars to Nigerian e-mail scams. This year, hes been on tour with a full band in support of his second full-length album, "Secrets from the Future." While on the road, he was the subject of a documentary film, also entitled "Nerdcore Rising." I had a chance to talk with MC Frontalot about the life of a professional rapper and the growing buzz around nerdcore hip-hop.

Jay Hathaway: There are a quite a few rappers out there who identify themselves as nerdcore, but you're the one who originally coined the phrase?

MC Frontalot: Yep.

JH: Do you put a lot of stock in the Godfather of nerdcore hip-hop label? If you have beef, will other rappers wake up with the heads of their favorite horses in their beds?

MCF: I'd love to say that I put no stock in any labels, but that would sound kind of disingenuous since labeling myself nerdcore has been my route to marginal celebrity. More likely I send them a tubgirl jpeg or something. Let them wake up with that. Not that I ever have beef with rappers. I like rappers. Even if their rapping is not very good and they haven't got manners. Anyone who can get it together to put a recording of themselves rapping on the Internet has got some courage. I salute.

JH: Yeah, nerdcore seems to be an extremely collaborative thing. Have you gotten involved in any of the nerdcore compilations that are coming together online?

MCF: When Rhyme Torrents was starting up, I was right in the middle of a bunch of stuff. I got some remixes over to Jason, who runs that project. I've promised him something original for his autumn comp. I haven't been on anyone else's. I'm not sure if I've heard of anyone else doing comps. I just sent MC Hawking a verse for a song called "History Of Nerdcore that he's putting on his new record.

JH: Did you and MC Hawking meet through Songfight?

MCF: He wrote to me, having found me in Google because I had mentioned him in my FAQ. That is how nerds create relationships: Google. I might have even heard him before I recorded Nerdcore Hip-hop. He's been at it longer than I have. My favorite was Entropy, which is modeled on "O.P.P." by Naughty By Nature.

JH: How do you generate the topics for your rhymes? Do they come from the whole zeitgeist of nerddom, or are they based on your own nerd proclivities?

MCF: I always pick things that I'm fascinated by. I don't even try very hard to keep it in the realm of the geektastic, but I usually end up there anyway. There are topics that I kind of wish I were into, because I get so many requests for songs about them. For instance, Cthulu.

JH: What rhymes with Cthulu, anyway?

MCF: Le Pew Crew.

JH: If I print that, someone's going to start it and release an album by the end of the month.

MCF: Sudoku. Whatever. Cartoon skunk rap is so 2003.

JH: What do you think the big thing is going to be in 2008? Spimes? The election? You've dealt with some semi-political topics before.

MCF: Maybe a Spime The Vote project could make a splash. I am going to be following the shit out of the election, personally. And I think it's almost as disgraceful as our country's health crisis and poverty levels, that we have such a miserable voting system. I have been thinking that it is an amazing opportunity for some large-scale civic heroism from our tech sector's brain trust. If someone could rally Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, I dunno who -- the people who've been thinking about security for the last 15 years and have spent five billion on it already -- get them all in a room, get them to work out a perfect voting system. It only needs to be 100% secure, transparent, and auditable. I think they could knock it out in a month. Probably do it for free, for prestige points. Then staple that shit onto the national constitution. Subsidize voting machines in the states. Then maybe we'd have some kind of footing for suggesting that American democracy is a model to look up to.

JH: It would still take a while for the hardcore technophobes to go along with it.

MCF: Technophobes are giving themselves brain cancer every day to talk about their favorite digital cable shows with each other on the cell phone. They respond well to marketing. Also, people respond well to hope. If they were offered a convincing avenue towards un-stealable elections, it would engender hope that voting mattered. Democracy is actually a pretty kick-ass idea, it's just really easy to get disheartened about it because it crumples so easily when corruption is injected.

JH: Fair point. I think people are jaded by the sloppy efforts thus far to update voting technology -- maybe a good dose of marketing is what it will take to undo that.

MCF: People love heroes. Nerd heroes. This country has more Nerd Heroes of Capitalism than any other place on earth. I'm telling you, a superteam could create a marketable and technically sound solution. It's the only place I've ever wanted the private sector to offer a solution to government. Anyway, yeah. I do political songs. It costs me casual listeners, I think. But I can't help it. I was raised in Berkeley.

JH: So you're not willing to compromise that to perhaps become the music scene's own Nerd Hero of Capitalism?

MCF: If I'm ever a hero of anything, it will probably not be capitalism. I'm kind of terrified of capitalism. On a large scale, it is always gangsterism. I'm lucky to be such a niche figure, musically, that I never have to compromise anything. Conceptually, but also musically. If I want my second verse to be twice as long as the first, I can just be like, Fuck it, this thing's never going to be on the radio anyway.

JH: Right. And you're fronting full-time now, correct?

MCF: I am. I am lucky as hell that I happened to be in control of a web server right around when MP3s became viable. Bandwidth availability and home-desktop CPU speed kind of hit a convergence. When Layer 3 was invented, it was pushing the hell out of both but just barely workable. And that was when I got my hands on Cool Edit Pro and started making Frontalot songs, which I put on the computer so that a couple of far-off friends could hear them. Then there was Songfight, and then there was a little following. And then there was notice in Penny Arcade, then there was a bigger following. And then a couple years ago I started gigging regularly and stopped doing design freelancing. Now I am a professional rapper.

JH: But most of your music sales are still in CD form?

MCF: Yeah, I do more CDs than iTunes. But that's because my fans are big-hearted. They know my margin on CDs is astronomical, and I think they buy them just to be supportive. It's like the free tote bag when you guilt-tip PBS.

JH: You met some pretty hardcore fans when you were on tour behind the new album earlier this year.

MCF: They are pretty devoted, most of them. They tell me how far they've driven to see the show. Sometimes it's 10 or 12 hours. On last year's tour we had a young woman follow us for 9 shows over about 6,000 miles. I don't think anyone's going to beat that soon.

JH: What was it like going from putting MP3s together at home to putting together a live show and going on the road with a band?

MCF: It's a big shift, from computer music to fronting a band. The songs all start inside the multitracker, and are usually heavily-layered loop-based affairs. I am very lucky to have my keyboardist Gm7 and the rest of my band. Their musical training far exceeds mine, and they do an excellent job transforming the recorded music into live funk arrangements. They are also huge fun to be on stage with and pretty good company in the van. Except that Blak Lotus left an unwrapped stick of butter on the upholstery one time. I am still sore about that. Speaking of which, have you been getting a lot of spam about wholesale canned butter lately? It is perplexing the hell out of me.

JH: Nah, my spam is all about penny stocks.

MCF: Who buys canned butter? Who came up with the idea of canned butter? Also: canned entire turkeys. They do not make cans that large. I think it is code for something else. Like if I wrote back they would send me heroin or slave orphans or something. There is a sealed can of stuffing INSIDE the canned turkey.

JH: So, what is MC Frontalot fronting about? Do you front that you're a bigger nerd than you really are? or a better rapper?

MCF: Well, ironically, I keep it real on both accounts. But at a base level, there's just this huge amount of fronting that I have to do to pick up a microphone at all. I have to present this idea that I am a good enough rapper that anyone should bother listening to me, which is not really true. And to get on stage I have to convince both the audience and myself, briefly, that I am the belle of the ball. Actually on some level, I do believe that I'm the belle of the ball. But I am also completely disgusted with my own egotism, so I have to front like I'm slightly better suited to this career than I am. I am also terrified of being weak and ugly. I think maybe most folks who grew up being told that they were nerds harbor those two fears. So I have to front like I am well-adjusted enough to take on the career of the professional Nerd Quasi-Celeb, a role that is intrinsically reliant on weakness and ugliness in order to make sense.

JH: But people have been convinced enough that they want to emulate you.

MCF: I don't know that I convinced anyone of anything. I think people just hear the word nerdcore and are like, Hells yeah, I would rather be described by that word than by 'dork-ass!' I kind of knew some people would grab onto the word like that. It's why I kept using it after that first song. You can blame my Net Bubble years attending fucking branding meetings. Although I spent the majority of my time in those years sitting in Duboce Park and smoking pot and writing jokes for ad banners. The branding meetings were kind of rare.

MCF: Blak Lotus just came up to pet Doggy Fresh. I said I'm doing an interview with SG and he says to send someone over. Strictly professional. We have got like cameraphones and, um, costuming.

JH: Speaking of SuicideGirls, is Goth Girls autobiographical?

MCF: Yeah, I've always had an over-active interest in ladies who dress like that. In real life I am probably over my interest in the, Oh woe is me and behold the darkness of my soul personality traits. But the part of me that will always be 18 still romanticizes it. Plus, of course, in real life there are a million ladies who wear the trappings but have no personal interest in writing terrible poetry and pretending they don't want to show it to me, and then showing it to me. And yes, my shyness and intimidation in the face of these women is still very real. I was hoping when I put that song out that someone from SG would write and ask to keep it posted on their front page forever, but nobody ever did. I think it would make a nice theme song for the site.

JH: I'll definitely suggest it to them. So what was it like for someone who's kind of shy to be followed around by documentary filmmakers?

MCF: Well, I am kind of shy when I am interacting with people who I don't know in a social setting. But with the cameras on, after the first week or so, I am pretty hammy. It's just blah blah blah. And Gm7 and I have known each other since we were 14. Lotus has known us since we were 18. So we go way back and have a million nonsense routines that we fall into. The cameras never had to film any awkward silences.

[After an awkward silence ]

JH: So the concept of nerdcore started out as kind of marketing catchphrase or a rallying cry for your fans, but now it's been written up in several publications, and there's an entire documentary around it. Is it kind of strange seeing where people are going with it?

MCF: It was bizarro at first, yeah. I guess I've gotten used to the idea. Still makes me happy every time the word shows up in the press.

JH: Do you think people are over-analyzing it, or taking it more seriously than it was ever intended? There's a moment in the trailer for Nerdcore Rising [the documentary] where a girl says she thinks it's actually a little bit racist -- was she joking?

MCF: I don't know if she was! It's certainly not out of bounds to discuss race as it relates to nerdcore, and in fact it's a complicated issue for me. I'm certainly not lampooning hip-hop or anything. I don't try to make outsider rap. But hip-hop, in all of its roots, is about being black. I mean, the songs are about a black experience, and the music is originally a mash-up and eventually a huge expansion of American black musical tradition. So when a rapper who is white makes songs that an overwhelmingly white audience deems more easily relatable, that can be a super thorny cultural position to occupy. And I'm making these songs, and I see people on [bulletin boards] posting stuff like, I always hated rap music, but these songs are speaking to me! He mentioned Unix! It's like, yay for someone getting something out of my song, but I really hope it leads him or her to explore the breadth of hip-hop and not towards the crummy notion that white folks are finally opening it up. I kind of hope (but do not actually imagine) that Justin Timberlake wrestles with the same issue as concerns R&B.

JH: Talking about fans who are exposed to hip-hop through nerdcore, have you run into fans who were already listening to mainstream hip-hop and got into nerdcore through that?

MCF: Very few. But some. They always want to talk about a million cutting-edge underground rappers who I haven't heard of. I am routinely embarrassed by my own ignorance in these and in other hip-hop related situations.

JH: What kind of music were you into when you started out?

MCF: Started out when? When I first could work my mom's record player?

JH: Oh, sorry. When you started making the initial MC Frontalot tracks. But ok, also, what did you listen to growing up? Because we can never really escape that, I think.

MCF: I was listening to Tom Waits nonstop that year. In 1999, let's see also Black Star. Oh, Eminem had just come out! That was of course the moment when it seemed like it was not insane for a white person to rap and for it not to be a joke. Lets see ... Common, Busta Rhymes, Outkast, Tribe Called Quest, Beasties, Missy E. I'm sure I was still listening to Bizarre Ride II: The Pharcyde.

MCF: When I was little first record I ever had was Abbey Road. Beatles and Paul Simon were my favorites from my mom's collection. First tape I ever bought myself was Cargo by Men At Work. First concert I ever went to was Huey Lewis on my 12th birthday, I think. First rap CD I bought was DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, followed very quickly by Straight Outta Compton, and probably Nation Of Millions right after that.

JH: When you mentioned Huey Lewis, I was tempted to go for the easy "Hip to be Square" reference.

MCF: I should do a song called "Hip-Hop to be Square" and then slit my own throat.

JH: Looking into the future a little bit, what do you have planned for the next album or the next tour?

MCF: I think another spring album for next year. I'd like to do a live record in between. There are three great recordings from spring of this year: Seattle, San Francisco, and Richmond, VA. I'm going to cobble those together into a long set and get it mastered, then maybe sell it cheap for the December gift-giving season. I am hoping to have a fall tour, but it is up in the air a bit. There are flyout gigs for late summer: Penny Arcade Expo, Kingdom of Loathing Con, some college things, some shows here and there. I'm doing something in Brooklyn or Manhattan on August 29th, finally with Jesse Dangerously. That's exciting for me.

JH: Have any labels come after you, since you've been getting quite a bit of press this year? Is the big studio album something you eventually want to do?

MCF: It's a funny position I'm in. A label would have to be able to sell about 10 times as much music and merch as I do on my own before it would even make sense for me to sign up. That's how much bigger my cut is as a self-released artist. That said, it would not take all that much marketing to make me ten or fifteen times as famous as I am currently. But I don't think major labels are spending anything to market weird new niche acts these days. Somewhere there's someone at a label who wants desperately to find and develop the next They Might Be Giants, but that guy is basically an insane visionary and I don't know if he's ever going to talk his boss out of a healthy advance for someone like me. The labels are playing things as conservatively as possible while the CD market shifts to a digital market. And all the record stores are closing and everyone's freaking out. All that said, of course nobody from a reputable label has even said hello to me, so it's all navel gazing. And all that said, if I could do a record with the Dust Brothers or Timbaland or Neptunes, I'd squirt come all over myself in glee.

I've heard a few of his songs but never really knew who he was 'til the other day while on Pandora I decided to type in MC Chris and Frontalot was the artist that played next. Needless to say I enjoy his music.